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AppDynamics Pushes Application Performance Management to the Cloud

Posted by Beth Bacheldor
February 23, 2010

Tags: APM, AppDynamics, application performance management, cloud computing

Channel: Data Center, Networking & Mgmt

Yap Inc., a Web company that runs its automated voice-to-text transcription business on a cloud computing infrastructure, needed a way to monitor and manage just how long it takes to receive voice mails from customers and turn them into e-mails or text messages. So it turned to start-up AppDynamics, which this week unveiled its application performance management (APM) software built from the ground up to manage applications running in the cloud, virtual and service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments.

Founded in 2008 by Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics is unveiling its AppDynamics 2.0 solution which is designed to help companies identify and resolve problems with applications that are running in highly distributed environments (this is the first version with general availability; AppDynamics is officially coming out of stealth mode with the the 2.0 version).

Before founding the company, Bansal, now AppDynamics' CEO, led design and architecture for several products at Wily Technologies, including Wily Introscope, an APM system used to detect and diagnose performance problems in composite and Web application environments. While it gave organizations a much-needed tool for the Java and .Net environments, the system was only able to provide visibility into applications running on a single Java Virtual Machine. There was no real visibility into distributed transactions. So Bansal got the idea to architect a next-generation APM solution. "For these cloud and virtual environments, you need wide and deep visibility," Bansal says. Moreover, the solution needs to be able to dynamically act, based on what the APM system is learning about transaction and application performance. That is a key part of application performance management. It has to be much more dynamic." As he writes on his company blog, Bansal wanted to give IT professionals a way to not only monitor application performance, but also to find and fix root-cause problems--to combine traditional monitoring with the ability to "orchestrate capacity in the cloud."

That is one of the cornerstones of AppDynamics 2.0--the ability to monitor cloud-deployed applications and intelligently provision capacity as needed. "As performance slows down because loads go up, companies should be able to scale up capacity. The solution needs to handle cloud-bursting, so you can get temporary capacity," says Bansal. "And when the spike goes away, then the solution can get rid of that capacity."

Policy-driven workflows with AppDynamics 2.0 can be triggered to automatically address capacity problems. The solution ships with a cloud connector to Amazon EC2 and a set or pre-defined workflow templates to automate application provisioning and configuration. Application Dynamics plans to add other cloud connectors and templates in future versions. AppDynamics 2.0 provides organizations with a visual map of the application topology, and the software can dynamically discover all the application tiers and back-end services. The solution constantly looks at the application topology and can automatically discover new code. "Application logic is split amongst a lot of servers in these SOA and cloud environments, and often there are upgrades and new releases of code daily or weekly," says Steve Roop, VP of marketing at AppDynamics. "When so much is changing on the development side, the IT guys are the ones that have to catch that pitch."

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